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Primaprimaprima

...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				
User ID: 342


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC
				


				
					

					
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs




I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.


If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)".  This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often.  And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite.  "What?  All men just want a 'hot' woman.  But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same.  Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."


I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him.  As far as my observations can confirm anyway.  Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult.  It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits.  We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself.  If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.


What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria.  In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything.  There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls.  As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety?  Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that".  You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself.  And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter.  Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"?  If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s.




I mean, of course she's wrong about this point.  An unregulated sexual marketplace (assuming all individuals are as free as possible from physical and economic coercion) privileges women over men for much the same reason that an unregulated free market privileges large corporations over workers.  I assume that most of the commentariat here is already familiar with this analysis.


But the thing is that you can know she's wrong without even doing a full analysis of why she's wrong, because you can see that she fundamentally doesn't understand why people around her act the way that they do.  She admits that she's confused by the actions of both men and women around her and she doesn't have a comprehensive theory to explain their behavior, so she resorts to mystifying explanations that are grounded in morality and "mental illness" (a synonym for throwing your hands up and saying "idk"), instead of seeing the people around her as rational actors who are doing the best they can within the constraints laid out for them by biology and decision theory.


Also I have to comment on this:




the ‘male centered woman.’




because it's just so wild that she would use this phrase without even a hint of irony or reflection.  Thanks to "J. Allen" for mentioning it in the comments under her post.  ("Men don't worry about whether we're centering women--most of us are in some form or fashion." -- lol, exactly).  She talks about the "male centered woman" like it's a unique affliction that only burdens women, but her friend from New York whose entire social life revolves around setting up and going on dates with women isn't a "female centered man" because...?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If anyone thinks ChatGPT is ready to replace programmers then just like... ask it to build some software for you.  Enough to run a sustainable business.  It's ready to be an employee, ok then, go employ it.  That's free money for you that's just sitting there for the taking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report


(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)


There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum.  Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):




A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:








It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.










The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?










[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.










People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.










[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.






The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:




I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":






    

  • Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
    • 







    

  • Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
    • 







    

  • Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
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  • Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
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  • Decreased sensory sensitivity.
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  • Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
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  • Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
    • 





Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high.  Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men.  By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc.  This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman.  But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).


Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study.  In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality).  Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms).  I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological!  Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But increasingly, the only roles which are prestigious in modernity are those of white collar undefined-what-the-value-add-here-is jobs and those of pushing the bounds of theoretical knowledge




This isn't necessarily directed at you in particular, but it seems like a good excuse to talk about it:


I often see sweeping generalizations about "prestige" on TheMotte that betray a very particular kind of coastal, Blue Tribe, upper-middle-to-lower-upper class perspective on what counts as prestigious and why.  But not everyone in "society" shares that perspective.  Ask yourself, the types of guys who are actually working these trade jobs, do they know about your concept of prestige?  Do they know what you consider prestigious or not?  And if they do know, do they care what you consider prestigious or not?  It's not a rhetorical question, I'm legitimately asking.  I don't exactly have a foot in that world either.


Think about a black teenager growing up in the projects in inner city Chicago.  He's a part of "modernity" too.  What does he consider prestigious?  He may be aware to a more or less vague degree that people think that being the President is prestigious, or that being Elon Musk is prestigious.  But what he considers most viscerally prestigious, his "revealed preference" for prestige if you will, is being the local drug dealer, or the most feared local warlord.  That's what actually matters in his world.  Or maybe he could aspire to be a major rapper or athlete; those are things that "society at large" finds prestigious as well.  Those positions are certainly compensated well enough.  But even then, they're the sort of thing that the more well-to-do Blue Tribe perspective might look down upon as "tacky".  Note that a couple comments here have already given their personal shortlist of what they consider prestigious, and "being Jay Z" and "being Tom Brady" haven't made any of the lists so far.


I once read a comment here that said "being a doctor is one of the most prestigious things you can be".  And I just thought... really?  Really?  I mean it's an important job, don't get me wrong.  Thank you for your services.  I'm happy for them that they're making a lot of money.  But at the end of the day it's, from my perspective, still just another job.  Doctors are, modulo individual technical skill, fungible, and fungibility is antithetical to prestige as far as I'm concerned.


Now, if I were in the same room as say, I dunno, David Chalmers or Slavoj Zizek, I might find myself stumbling over my words in a vain attempt to make a good impression, because those people have achieved social positions that I do consider to be highly prestigious.  But this is hardly a universal opinion!  Many educated and well off people of good repute have never heard those names; and if I were to explain to these same educated and well off people that they were philosophy professors, a common response (particularly from those of a more conservative bent) would be "well they're just parasites who are stealing our tax dollars and filling young peoples' heads with nonsense, so why the hell would I think they're prestigious?"  (In fact your reference to the "philosophy of fartsniffing" indicates that this would likely be your response!)


The TL;DR is that there are almost as many conceptions of prestige as there are people, so before we say that the prestige of such and such a thing is motivating people to do XYZ, we should establish what model of prestige the individuals in question are actually operating on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In this post, you condemn and criticize the concept of white solidarity.  This is a sentiment that you share with almost everyone else in the Western "first" world today, except for a tiny minority of self-conscious white advocates.


Your primary motivation for writing the post was your negative sentiment towards white solidarity, rather than your positive support of an alternative political program.  We can tell this by the way you framed your post: almost the entirety of it is dedicated to criticisms of the white identitarian right.  If your goal was to give people positive, substantive reasons for supporting your own preferred political program, you would have instead titled your post "why I think the right should support pure meritocracy / free trade neoliberalism / race blind Nietzschean will to power / whatever terms you would use to describe your own ideology".


Why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?  It can't be a purely "formal" concern like, "I think the Online Right is wasting their time pursuing a futile and unhelpful set of policies; they could instead be devoting their time and resources to my cause instead".  The Online Right is small and powerless; you can't be that eager to enlist their help.  Whatever your preferred political program is would probably find itself right at home in the agenda of Ramaswamy, or Musk, or Thiel, or the Koch brothers, or maybe even Trump himself.  You have far more powerful and influential backers you could be appealing to, instead of wasting your time trying to persuade the "Online Right".


So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.




Yeah that’s one of the obnoxious aspects of the post-WW2 mythos.


Stop trying to guilt trip me into seeing one side or the other as intrinsically righteous. Everything has to be a “genocide” or an “ethnic cleansing”. Why can’t it just be a fight? Men fight with each other. Always has been always will be.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.




This is not politics.  This is an arbitrary list of demands.


Your "politics" is the constellation of principles and cognitive patterns that cause you to demand certain things.  (Or, alternatively, as a Marxist might say: politics is the analysis of the material and social conditions that give rise to certain principles and cognitive patterns, which in turn give rise to concrete demands.)


The interesting thing isn't that you like vaccines, it's why you like vaccines (and what makes you different from people who don't).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nah. People have been trained to see “we should do nothing” as being equivalent to “we should support the oppressors”, it’s a tactic that they’re very used to dealing with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				A Depressed Shrink Tries Shrooms
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Had a friend who got really into shrooms.  It basically ruined his life for a while, and he was only able to recover after he fully quit doing drugs.  Went into a sustained severe manic state, spent his entire life savings in short order, lost multiple jobs in quick succession due to erratic behavior, revealed to me detailed plans that if acted upon would have lead to severe social and potentially legal/criminal damage.  And the entire time he was subjectively convinced that he had achieved enlightenment and his actions were infallible.  It permanently put me off of ever trying shrooms and has made me skeptical of all accounts that portray psychedelics as "harmless".


(Full disclosure, this was confounded by the fact that he was also doing massive quantities of THC at the same time.  But then, people present THC as harmless too, so you'd think that harmless thing 1 + harmless thing 2 would be fine...)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men




A lot of women who are heavily invested in gay M/M content report enjoying it because it feels "safer" and "less complicated" than hetero content.  They want to enjoy a romantic relationship in a "voyeuristic" way without having the worry about the imbalanced power dynamics that are intrinsically a part of any relationship between men and women.  If the characters in the story are both men, then she can enjoy it without having to worry about the possibility of "self-inserting" as the female character and getting too personally enmeshed in the story, which could dredge up uncomfortable hang-ups about her own real life sexuality.  It's not so much about running to the image of an idealized man as it is about running away from the dangers that real men present.


Obviously, it's something that she mostly has to work out for herself.  I think the best thing you can do is to just set a good example in your relations with your own family, and if it ever seems appropriate to bring up, be open and honest about your own political views, what you perceive as the deleterious effects of modern wokeness, etc (the danger here isn't so much the porn per se, but rather the fact that the communities for this type of content tend to be filled with radfem and woke types who could reinforce negative beliefs).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I want to know whether [...] is someone's kink




The answer is always yes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At the same time, there surely exists some threshold where a direct attack on another country’s capital city goes from “potentially just symbolic” to “definitely not symbolic”.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.


A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".


This, on the other hand, is suffering:




The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Inmates took complete control of the prison and twelve officers were taken hostage. [...]






Events spiraled out of control within the cell blocks in large part due to the actions of two gangs. The first were the Chicanos, who protected each other and dished out targeted retribution for specific grudges. The other gang was loosely labeled the Aryan Brotherhood and was led by some of the most dangerous inmates (who by this time had been released from segregation in Cell Block 3). They decided to break into Cell Block 4, which held prisoners labeled as informers. Cell Block 4 also housed inmates who were mentally ill, convicted of sex crimes, or otherwise vulnerable, and held a total of 96 prisoners. [...]






During an edition of BBC's Timewatch program, an eyewitness described the carnage in Cell Block 4. He saw an inmate held up in front of a window; he was being tortured by using a blowtorch on his face and eyes until his head exploded. Another story was about Mario Urioste, who was jailed for shoplifting. He was originally placed by officers in a violent unit where he was gang-raped by seven inmates. Mario had filed a lawsuit against his rapists, so prison officials had housed him in Cell Block 4 for his own protection. Urioste was one of the targets for revenge. His body was found hanged, with his throat cut and his dismembered genitals stuffed into his mouth.




The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal?  If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Religious leaders did not adequately stand up against the mass movement.






Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement.




They ARE the movement bruh.




This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?




People have been asking this for at least a century.  "The Nazis listened to Wagner and read Goethe and they still plunged the entire planet into total war, how is that possible?"


Philosophy in the Socratic tradition (and if we can speak of a "western tradition" at all, as distinct from other traditions, then we must start with Socrates) never promised wisdom.  It promised a love of wisdom; it promised a critique of those who pretend to wisdom.  But wisdom itself is for the gods alone.  So it is unsurprising when mortals do things that are unwise.




The main “public critics” of the period have little in common except that they were passionate and somewhat neurotic men.




You have to be something of a weirdo to violate social consensus as publicly and flagrantly as Peterson did.




Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make.




Because the experts wanted it to happen, they couldn't perceive it as a threat if it wasn't threatening to them in the first place.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I also disagree with the ban, but I do understand the frustration.


We have a history on TheMotte of people who show up and intone in a solemn voice, "I'd like to play a game..."  At which point they begin constructing an elaborate series of arguments and hypotheticals that are high on word count but light on content, the aims of which are never entirely clear.  And when people point out that it seems like they're being evasive about their own genuine beliefs, and they're not being entirely forthcoming about their intentions, they respond with "oh don't mind me, I'm but a humble explorer of political thought-space, my only aim here is to educate..."


For obvious reasons, interacting with these people is very obnoxious, and their threads generate more heat than light.  So tolerance for these characters is low.  And Turok, while not one of the more extreme examples, does pattern match to this sort of archetype.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well yes there is a significant monkey's paw aspect, that's why I said it's a problem.  If the answer was obvious, it wouldn't be a problem.  I'm not a utilitarian or a consequentialist, I don't adhere to an "anti-suffering ethics".  But I also appreciate the gravity of the problem and I understand why people do become utilitarians.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


a hateful, developmentally stunted man who picked his wounds in public




So you mean to say, he was an artist!


The greater works are always autobiographical to some degree.  In minor works, the author's own individuated personality is not strong enough to shine through ("every great philosophy hitherto has been a confession on the part of its author" [emphasis mine]).


Sometimes you won't always like the autobiographical content that is thus exposed.  It won't always be admirable, it won't always speak to your own experience, etc.  But you can still choose to adopt a more detached viewpoint and find what can be appreciated in it as a phenomenon for its own sake.


Of course this is not a natural and spontaneous attitude, but one that must be cultivated through diligent practice.  I try to make a habit of doing mental exercises like, I imagine someone I admire, either because of their work or on a personal level or whatever, and I imagine: what if I discovered something absolutely horrifying about them?  What if their own values actually turned out to be antithetical to everything I value?  What if they hated free expression, what if they supported wireheading, etc.  Or maybe there's something far worse than any of that, something that my conscious mind won't even let me access.  And in this hypothetical I try to remind myself that, in spite of all that, there still has to be some kernel there that made me admire them in the first place, so my goal at that point would be to achieve an understanding of the phenomenon that is the person as a whole, rather than get bent out of shape about the individual things that we disagreed on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche.




That's interesting that you say that.  I'm incredibly lucky to have some male friends where we have essentially no secrets (or close to it, at any rate).  But I recognize that that's unusual and most friendships (regardless of gender composition) never get to that level.


There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship.  I'd like to tell them they're being overly cynical, but I also can't say that their fears are entirely baseless either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.




No, I know what he's talking about with that one.  (Not because I've ever been on HRT, but because on this particular point he's just describing how I am by default, and this point seems to be a persistent and noticeable difference between how I experience things and how other people experience things.)


The simplest way I could describe it would be something like, "the impression that sensory perceptions carry semantic content that extends beyond the boundaries of what is literally contained in the sense perception".  Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc.  I think that everyone is familiar with these types of experiences to some degree (could be something as simple as, visiting a place you haven't been to since you were a little kid and triggering nostalgic memories as a result), but some people have these types of sensations much more frequently and intensely than others, and from a wider range of stimuli.  But the point is that it doesn't have to be attached to traditional "centers of meaning" like new projects or new social relations.


It could also be described as "a strong natural resistance to depression".  Typically when I hear people describe depressive moods they use language like "feeling empty", feeling like everything has been "drained of meaning", feeling like "nothing matters", and... I've never felt any of that.  Like ever.  It's hard to imagine feeling like that when everything is so damn meaningful all the time!  (On the flip side, I am extremely prone to anxiety, so it's not at all the same thing as just having a clean bill of mental health.)


This is how my perception has worked since early childhood, so I can confidently say I'm not describing the effects of psychedelics or other foreign substances.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine.




Because Israel is white and neo-colonialist.  In their view.  And that's pretty much the worst thing you can be.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Julian Edelman can be caught in a one-night-stand with a chubster, Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty




It’s quite plausible that they were simply acting on their own preferences!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


she should be satisfied with her own personhood




Do you know how many humans (male or female) are "satisfied with their own personhood"?


Not many!


We are all, at all times, engaged in a vain and desperate struggle to alter ourselves in order to solve the riddle of the Other's desire.  It's not a woman thing it's a human thing.




"However, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other's desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact: fantasy, the phantasmatic scene or scenario, is an answer to: ‘You’re saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it?'  The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me?  What do they see in me?  What am I for those others?'  A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations, he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him.  His father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, fight their battles in his name; the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son.  While being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others, just what kind of games they are playing with him.  Fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am for my others.  This intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like the one, reported by Freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake.  What we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it).  The crucial feature is that, while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment.  What the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about was her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire."




(From Zizek's "How to Read Lacan")


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Liberalism (meaning, not socialism and not hard right) is the dominant position here, and pretty much everywhere else too. Libertarianism is also popular here.


You were probably looking for a term like “progressive” or “woke” instead of “liberal”.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.




Ah!  Well, that's certainly an important piece of information that was elided.  You should have simply started there and been honest about your concerns and worries, instead of going for the "500 IQ pwn everyone with facts and logic" play.  The dialogue is so much more insightful and constructive when we cut the bullshit and just talk about what's actually bothering us.


I'm not unsympathetic to you, because I'm not without my own anxieties about race.  Although I've received 99.9% (non-Ashkenazi) European (and 0.1% SSA/MENA/etc) from multiple ancestry tests, my appearance is rather on the "swarthy" end by white standards, which lead to teachers and other kids at school asking me on multiple occasions if I was mixed with anything.  It gave me doubts about what I actually was, or if other white people even saw me as white at all.


Combine that with the fact that I never knew my birth father, and I'll never be able to be truly certain about what I am and where I came from.


But in some sense none of that matters, because I believe that the way that white people are treated by modern wokeness is wrong, and I believe that they have the right to have their own political movement, on their own terms.  Even if those terms were so strict that they excluded me.  I'd still believe that regardless of whether I was black or Chinese or anything.


Now, my situation is different from someone who is knowingly and visibly mixed (especially someone whose "other half" is both non-white and non-Ashkenazi).  But the point is, you're not the only one with anxieties, and honest political dialogue starts with facing those anxieties and putting them at the center of the conversation, because they're essentially the major determining factor of your political orientation.